He glanced at the homemade gun in Eliot Caruthers’ hand. It had the look of a clumsy plastic toy. “So that’s the
weapon.
I guess you could mess up a good-sized flea with a pellet from a thing like that. I had one of those guns when I was a kid.”
Mark and Jesse were looking up at him, and their eyes said no, they didn’t think so—not a gun quite like this one.
Well, he reasoned, kids could never imagine adults as young people. To Caruthers he said, “Eliot, you can take them on back to the school. How many kids have you got over the holidays?”
“Eleven.” The school’s director gave no outward sign of his feelings. The boys stole guilty glances at him in a futile attempt to assess their damages.
“Well, I’d keep them close to home till we find out what happened to those girls.”
“Thank you, Howard, I will.” Eliot Caruthers shook hands with the medical examiner. As he was marching his young charges toward the vintage Rolls-Royce, he turned back with an afterthought. “Oh, Howard? There won’t be any news of this incident in the—”
“The newspapers? No, not if I can help it.” There were already enough rumors circulating about the school for the rich and the strange. No need to feed the townspeople ideas about the children being dangerous. He watched the school’s director load the boys into his car and drive back toward the dirt road connecting all the lakefront houses.
Charlie Croft shrugged, saying, “Kids.” In that one word he summed up all the world’s pranks, rude noises and now a dead body.
Another car came down the road, announcing itself with a coughing engine and churning dust. The station wagon pulled up next to the black hearse. The driver, Dr. Myles Penny, seemed mildly pissed off as he opened the car door. The general practitioner’s hair was ruffled, and he had not yet shaved this morning.
“Hey, Myles,” said Charlie Croft. “Sorry about your patient.”
“She’s William’s patient, not mine. But he’s on vacation this week.” Myles slammed the car door a bit harder than necessary. “You know William and his damn vacation time.”
Indeed. However, Dr. Chainy knew for a fact that William was still in town. He had seen the man skulking about in the village tobacco store that stocked his personal blend. But God forbid a dead patient should intrude on the heart surgeon’s personal time.
Myles Penny pulled back the zipper on the body bag and looked down on the ivory-white face of an elderly woman. “Yeah, she’s dead all right.” The general practitioner glared at the county medical examiner. “So, Howard, you guys called me all the way out here for a second opinion? How many gradations of dead are there?
Very
dead,
really
dead,
completely
dead—”
“I understand she had a thorough exam four days ago. Is that right, Myles?”
“Three or four days. William wanted to put her in the hospital and crack her chest open again. The old lady told him to stick that entire hospital where the sun never shines. Her very words.”
And now it was Dr. Chainy’s turn to be angry. “So that SOB
knew
she was in bad shape, and he never bothered to check on—”
“Settle down, Howard.” Myles put one hand on the medical examiner’s shoulder to remind him of his high blood pressure. “She wasn’t all alone out here. There’s a hired girl comes in every day to cook and clean.” He rubbed one hand over the stubble on his chin. “I can’t recall her name.”
“Well, this is a waste of time.” Dr. Chainy ripped a sheet of paper from his pad. “Here, Myles. You can take care of the paperwork.”
Myles Penny frowned as he accepted the printed form for the death certificate. “Am I supposed to thank you for this, Howard?”
“No need. You know if there’s a family lawyer?”
“Nope.” Myles spread the form on the hood of his station wagon and began to fill in the blank lines. “William will know. She’s been his patient for about ten, eleven years now.” He looked at the broken window and shook his head. “Damn kids. Was it a rock, or what? My nurse said—”
“Oh, it’s lucky the boys happened by and found her,” said Dr. Chainy, ignoring the question. He turned to Charlie Croft. “I think we can leave the kids out of the police report. Nobody’s gonna be pressing charges for that window. Oh, and somebody ought to have a word with that hired girl. Find out why she didn’t report the death.”
Chief Croft nodded. “I’ll put Phil on it. You think the girl might have run off with something valuable?”
“Now did I say that?” A crime would complicate things, but he could deal with that later. Just now he had a racquetball game awaiting him. “Maybe you and Myles could have a look around. See if there’s any
obvious
signs of theft.”
And please don’t find any.
He was enjoying the lull, the unusual lack of business in his morgue. A robbery would put this old woman’s corpse on his table.
Myles looked up from his paperwork. “And since you’re so busy, you figure all my patients can wait while I take care of that little chore?”
“Thanks, Myles. And maybe you can get a man out here to board up that window.”
“Right. And then later, I could just tidy up the dishes in the kitchen sink?”
Howard Chainy slapped him on the back. “You’re a real sport, Myles.”
Rouge Kendall only recognized a few faces among the FBI contingent. More agents had come to town in the past twenty-four hours, and now they accounted for nearly half this gathering of over fifty people.
At the back of the task-force room, a few men and women dangled cigarettes out an open window and exhaled blue clouds of smoke into the wind. Other BCI investigators sat on the tables and desks pushed against the walls. Most of the federal agents were clustered in standing groups of low conversations. The rest sat on folding chairs arranged in rows before a black metal lectern, which looked suspiciously like the sheet music holder from the local elementary school. The men outnumbered the women by at least six to one. No one but Rouge was under thirty-five, and most were at least ten years older.
The only man close to his own age was the uniformed state trooper posted at the door to keep out all but the invited. Rouge walked past the rows of chairs to stand by the windows of the rear wall. Turning his back on the assembly, he looked out over the vacant lot next to the station house. The grass was worn away in the configuration of a baseball diamond. This had been the home of the Makers Village Athletic League, where cops and firemen had donated their time to teach generations of kids the art of the all-American game. Now the lot was surrounded by an unfriendly chain-link fence, and the far corner was a collection of bricks and building materials. Come spring, the old baseball field would be the home of a discount furniture store, a new source of tax revenue for the town. Rouge thought the town council had made a bad trade.
When he turned around, his view of the front wall was partially obscured by the stocky build of Buddy Sorrel, a senior BCI investigator. Over the top of Sorrel’s graying crew cut, Rouge could see a collage of dead children pinned to the wall in eight-by-ten color glossies and newsprint shots of black and white. Five of the photographs were poster size and set on freestanding easels. The first in this row of large portraits was hidden from him, blocked by Captain Costello’s body. Rouge could make out the strands of auburn hair, a bit of pale skin—Susan?
Of course it was.
Two men passed in front of him, and when he could see this easel again, the photograph of his sister was gone, and Captain Costello was standing behind the lectern.
“Ladies and gentlemen?” The captain looked once around the room. Every head turned toward him. Paper coffee cups settled to laps and all conversation ceased. “First, I want to give you an update on the case. Please refer to your diagrams for the bus route.”
Everyone but Rouge pulled out a sheet of paper with red and blue map lines.
“One of the troopers found a child’s down jacket near the highway.” Costello held up his own map for the gathering to see, and his pencil pointed to a spot in the upper right-hand corner. “Mark the exit for Herkimer. That’s not far off the route of the bus that stops near the Hubble place. So we could still have a case of runaways. We’re not giving up on that theory. I don’t want to find out later that those two kids died of exposure while we were waiting on a ransom note.” He was staring at Rouge as he said this, and then his eyes traveled over all the heads in the room.
“The jacket we found is purple, and it matches the description of Sadie Green’s clothing. It’s torn up pretty bad. The techs say it looks like a dog’s been at it. We’re waiting for Sadie’s mother to come in and make a positive identification.”
The captain turned to the group of men and women near the wall of windows. “The second line of investigation is the ransom motive. Special Agent Arnie Pyle will brief us on that scenario.”
The cluster of federal agents fanned out along the bank of windows, putting some distance between themselves and a man who sat on the broad sill, legs dangling. He might be in his late thirties, and he was not Rouge’s idea of a typical FBI man. Special Agent Pyle lacked the ramrod posture, and his body type was more to lean wire than the solid muscle of his companions. Even the female feds seemed to be made of more solid stuff. But it was the man’s large brown eyes that captured Rouge’s attention. He knew those eyes, though nothing else about the angular face was at all familiar.
The door opened, and a state trooper stood to one side to admit the woman Rouge had encountered at Dame’s Tavern, the one who smiled with only half her face. Captain Costello seemed relieved to see her.
“But our first speaker,” said the captain, “will be Dr. Ali Cray.” All eyes were fixed on the dark-haired woman with the long skirt and the twisted red mouth. When she turned to face them, the room was quiet. Then began the asides of low voices, and several whispered words for ugly could be discerned over the general babble of males at the back of the room.
“Dr. Cray is joining the task force as a volunteer,” said Costello. “She’ll be advising us as a forensic psychologist with expertise in pedophilia. That’s the third line of investigation.” He beckoned her to the front of the room. “Dr. Cray?” He backed away to stand by the wall of photographs.
As Ali Cray walked across the wide floor, the slit in her skirt opened and closed, flashing a slice of white leg with each step, and all the men ceased to stare at her scarred face. When she came to rest behind the lectern, the pipe-thin pedestal afforded an open view of her long skirt, and though the curtain was closed, the men continued to watch the slit.
No one made a sound, not a cough, not a whisper. The lady owned the entire room. Yet she seemed so vulnerable, the only civilian among this battalion of law enforcement officers. That was the first mark against her—Ali Cray was not one of them. Then she would fall to the bottom of the scale on a male’s grading system for women; the scar had cost her that many points. And last, the female investigators and feds would not forgive her for the brief but wildly inappropriate display of bare leg—another crime.
Suddenly, Rouge found her very brave, standing up there alone, hanging out in the harsh light of judgment with her scar and her slit skirt.
“Good morning,” she said, poised between two of the giant easel portraits of dead children. “Last night on the Internet, I visited a chat room full of pedophiles. They were having a rational discussion on the
ethical
practice of child molestation—how to determine nonverbal sexual consent from a five-year-old. You see, when the child is crying and saying,
no,
they believe the child might mean
yes.
And they generally refer to the child as
it.
”
Investigator Buddy Sorrel shifted his stance to block the lectern, and now Rouge’s eyes were free to roam the photos on the easels. Two of the children were badly beaten and showing signs of exposure where the woodland scavengers had been at them. Two other bodies were in pristine condition. They had the appearance of having been posed for the camera.
“Every child molester is convinced that if you people only tried it once,
you
would
understand
,” said Dr. Cray. “They don’t see themselves as radically different from you, and in some respects they’re right. So forget your preconceptions. You won’t find this one if you’re looking under rocks. He could be the man sitting next to you, someone you’ve known for ten or twenty years.”
Rouge stared at the empty easel where Susan’s portrait had been. He filled the blank space with a photograph from his imagination, a picture made from the conversations of adults when he was a child of ten. His sister was lying on the snow, arms by her side, eyes open to the sky, a study of white on white, frost crystals sparkling among the strands of auburn hair. And he could see the police officers gathering around her small body, staring down at her.
Susan.
“Most child molesters are never caught,” said Ali Cray, calling his attention back to her. “And they know that. They consider capture and prosecution to have the same odds as a freak accident. When you do catch them, only one in five does a single day in jail.”
The older investigator moved out of his way, giving Rouge a clear view of Ali Cray. At that same moment, she discovered his face in the crowd. Perhaps she hadn’t read the morning papers, for she seemed startled to see him in this company.
In a somewhat smaller voice, she said, “You can’t fit human behavior into convenient slots. It’s a very wide spectrum of shadings. But I can give you the broad categories of predators. First, the situational molester—the opportunist, sometimes called a regressed pedophile. He averages eighty incidents with forty child victims, but he doesn’t have a preference for children over grown women. Sometimes the kid is just more convenient for him. He’s not sick. He’s just short of the moral character God gave a cockroach. But in this case, he’s not the one you want.”